The Munich Air Disaster - 50 Years On
Published Saturday, January 19, 2008 by Kevin Breathnach | E-mail this post
BBC Four, that last remaining staple of televisual worthiness, aired recently A Game of Two Eras, a documentary comparing English football of 50 years ago with that of today, based on the FA Cup finals of 1957 and 2007. What was more remarkable about the clips of the 1957 final, contested by Manchester Utd and Aston Villa, was not the cordial aggression with which the game was played, but that within less than one year, over half of the Manchester Utd starting line-up would be dead.
On February 6th, 1958, carrying the victorious Manchester Utd side home from their European Cup quarter-final against Red Star Belgrade, British European Airways Flight 609 crashed back into the snow-blanketed Munich runway from which it had three times attempted to take-off. 23 people were killed. Amongst them, some of the finest players British football had ever seen. Bobby Charlton survived to achieve the greatness of which he was capable. But Duncan Edwards, Liam Whelan, Roger Byrne, Mark Jones, Tommy Taylor, Eddie Coleman and Geoff Bent: they didn’t. High time, I think, that I declared my interest: Liam Whelan, who in 98 games for Man Utd scored 52 goals, was my grand-uncle. As the fiftieth anniversary of his and 22 others’ death looms, I thought it worth revisiting Eamon Dunphy’s A Strange Kind of Glory, which I read years ago and which, though planned (and performed) as an account of manager Matt Busby’s entire career, reigned above any attempt thitherto made to chronicle the pre-Munich years and its untimely departure into, I suppose, post-Munich years.
Eamon Dunphy, best known at home as a TV pundit and abroad as the ghost-writer of Roy Keane’s autobiography, has not here penned a particularly bad book. It’s well-researched, clearly quite genuine and rich in anecdote. But Dunphy’s prose is dreadful. It reads, more often than not, as if a paean to poverty, to the living conditions of the 1950s working-class and to ineducation. His grammar reflects as much. “He was feared was Jimmy.” “By the time Jimmy found out he’d spent a lot of passion.” “Johnny Carey was neither militant nor one of the lads. But that was not what was required of him.” At times, A Strange Kind of Glory reads like a version of social polemic The Road to Wigan Pier without the notorious respect its author, George Orwell, had for the English language and its grammar: “Except for Sundays this was all the family saw of Jimmy. He worked long hours. He been doing this for seven years.” Though he clearly has a sense for the social and cultural texture of 1950s football, Eamon Dunphy cannot write without appeal to the sentimental, to the informal and to the ungrammatical. A Strange Kind of Glory needs a different ghost-writer.
For they were the Busby Babes and their legend deserves better. In 1955, Matt Busby fielded a gifted team, conscripted and cultivated by his assistant Jimmy Murphy, marked not by their value, but by their youth. “Not old enough to have a drink,” says Dunphy. Their success was considerable. They won the league in 1956 and 1957 and, though the 1950s put an end to the illusion of British Football’s supremacy, in 1958 they were favourites to win the European Cup. They had successfully rejuvenated British Football which, 5 years previous, had been shown “sterile”, having suffered its greatest embarrassment when the national team was beaten 6-3 by Hungary. But their rejuvenation of the game is confined to anecdote, for the team’s name doesn’t appear on any European silverware until ten years down the list, marked 1968, when a rebuilt Manchester Utd won the European Cup under the captaincy of Bobby Charlton, the only remaining Busby Babe.
John F. Kennedy was granted office, but never given the time to govern with the virtue myth ascribes to him. His brother, Robert Kennedy, was killed before he was even elected. An assassin robbed Benizar Bhutto the occasion to turn Pakistan into a viable democracy. Irène Némirovsky was never to finish her five part Suite Francaise; she was killed by the Nazis before she came even to write the third book. We know these figures less for what they did than for what they did not do. And truly, we indulge in this injustice. It is this, the injustice of supposed greatness left unfinished, which - befittingly or not - makes the players of the Munich Air Disaster legendary and Manchester Utd - past, passing or to come - something more than a football club.
On February 6th, 1958, carrying the victorious Manchester Utd side home from their European Cup quarter-final against Red Star Belgrade, British European Airways Flight 609 crashed back into the snow-blanketed Munich runway from which it had three times attempted to take-off. 23 people were killed. Amongst them, some of the finest players British football had ever seen. Bobby Charlton survived to achieve the greatness of which he was capable. But Duncan Edwards, Liam Whelan, Roger Byrne, Mark Jones, Tommy Taylor, Eddie Coleman and Geoff Bent: they didn’t. High time, I think, that I declared my interest: Liam Whelan, who in 98 games for Man Utd scored 52 goals, was my grand-uncle. As the fiftieth anniversary of his and 22 others’ death looms, I thought it worth revisiting Eamon Dunphy’s A Strange Kind of Glory, which I read years ago and which, though planned (and performed) as an account of manager Matt Busby’s entire career, reigned above any attempt thitherto made to chronicle the pre-Munich years and its untimely departure into, I suppose, post-Munich years.
Eamon Dunphy, best known at home as a TV pundit and abroad as the ghost-writer of Roy Keane’s autobiography, has not here penned a particularly bad book. It’s well-researched, clearly quite genuine and rich in anecdote. But Dunphy’s prose is dreadful. It reads, more often than not, as if a paean to poverty, to the living conditions of the 1950s working-class and to ineducation. His grammar reflects as much. “He was feared was Jimmy.” “By the time Jimmy found out he’d spent a lot of passion.” “Johnny Carey was neither militant nor one of the lads. But that was not what was required of him.” At times, A Strange Kind of Glory reads like a version of social polemic The Road to Wigan Pier without the notorious respect its author, George Orwell, had for the English language and its grammar: “Except for Sundays this was all the family saw of Jimmy. He worked long hours. He been doing this for seven years.” Though he clearly has a sense for the social and cultural texture of 1950s football, Eamon Dunphy cannot write without appeal to the sentimental, to the informal and to the ungrammatical. A Strange Kind of Glory needs a different ghost-writer.
For they were the Busby Babes and their legend deserves better. In 1955, Matt Busby fielded a gifted team, conscripted and cultivated by his assistant Jimmy Murphy, marked not by their value, but by their youth. “Not old enough to have a drink,” says Dunphy. Their success was considerable. They won the league in 1956 and 1957 and, though the 1950s put an end to the illusion of British Football’s supremacy, in 1958 they were favourites to win the European Cup. They had successfully rejuvenated British Football which, 5 years previous, had been shown “sterile”, having suffered its greatest embarrassment when the national team was beaten 6-3 by Hungary. But their rejuvenation of the game is confined to anecdote, for the team’s name doesn’t appear on any European silverware until ten years down the list, marked 1968, when a rebuilt Manchester Utd won the European Cup under the captaincy of Bobby Charlton, the only remaining Busby Babe.
John F. Kennedy was granted office, but never given the time to govern with the virtue myth ascribes to him. His brother, Robert Kennedy, was killed before he was even elected. An assassin robbed Benizar Bhutto the occasion to turn Pakistan into a viable democracy. Irène Némirovsky was never to finish her five part Suite Francaise; she was killed by the Nazis before she came even to write the third book. We know these figures less for what they did than for what they did not do. And truly, we indulge in this injustice. It is this, the injustice of supposed greatness left unfinished, which - befittingly or not - makes the players of the Munich Air Disaster legendary and Manchester Utd - past, passing or to come - something more than a football club.
Labels: anniversary, football, munich, sport
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